Wikipedia is a free online encyclopedia that anyone can edit. By editing Wikipedia, you and your students are not joining a static website where they can publish a traditional academic paper. You will be joining the Wikipedia community, made up of real humans who volunteer their time and hard work to provide one of the world’s most valuable knowledge resources. It’s essential that you and your students understand how Wikipedia’s culture operates so you can participate meaningfully and respectfully.

It is likely that both you and your students have been taught to be wary of utilizing Wikipedia in formal academic spaces, with the exception of consulting the citations at the bottom of the page. Quite to the contrary, Wikipedia editors adhere to a critical culture committed to ensuring that content is accurate and representative. Readers and editors expect that Wikipedia’s articles should be extensively sourced by reputable publications.

Students will participate in Wikipedia’s citation practices by adding summaries of knowledge they find in high-quality sources, which they will reference to back up everything they write. Citations allow readers to verify the information they find on Wikipedia and enables them to dig deeper into topics. Ensuring verifiability makes Wikipedia a unique website, and it’s how the site has moderated misinformation and fake news since launching in 2001.

If students follow our trainings and assignment milestones, available to them via your Dashboard course page, they should feel equipped to participate in this incredible initiative to make comprehensive, diverse knowledge available to the world.